Welcome to the first in my series of blog posts about how to disrupt the monolingual bias in bilingual and TESOL education! I’m Dr. Lillian Ardell, speaker, bilingual ed coach, and monolingual bias disruptor!

If you are a bilingual, dual language, ESL teacher or school leader who cares about equity and social change for our ELLs and Multilingual Learners, then you’ve come to the right place!

What worries me about the state of reading instruction for bilinguals is how structured literacy initiatives, like Science of Reading, are narrowing the spotlight on what counts as effective literacy growth or proficiency. It’s time to call for a more expansive, and nuanced, lens on what counts - and what works! - for the reading instruction of MLLs. Read on to learn conmigo, mi gente.

My whiteness in Latinx spaces means I have more stories than you can count where I said or did something cringe-worthy that revealed my privilege and ignorance to what life is like as a racialized minority in US culture.

You can become the type of teacher that inspired you to enter the profession all those years ago, by changing one habit at a time. Come learn with Dr. Lillian Ardell, Bilingual Ed advocate and Applied Linguistics Scholar, as she shares insights from the research, her work with teachers, and life hacks that will build up your teaching practice today.

As a professor at an urban state-funded school that credentials teacher candidates (TCs) to enter the workforce, I was tasked with supervising field placements for those seeking a bilingual endorsement. Obtaining a doctorate in bilingual education at the local Big-Name University coupled with my decade of experience as a rank-and-file teacher, I felt up to the challenge.

Looking at ABAR pedagogies through the lens of three bilingual teacher types.

In this blog post, Lillian and Rachel bring their linguistic expertise to tackle how to bring sociolinguistic awareness in the elementary classroom!

My hunch was that the TCRWP curriculum–the stalwart curriculum that socialized many new teachers into a Balanced Literacy framework–was never designed with Emergent Bilinguals (EBs) in mind.

Funds of Knowledge is not simply asking BIPOC students to share personal anecdotes or access their schema and then move on. Read this post about what Luis Moll and colleagues truly intended for teachers to do when they use an FoK lens in their instruction.

In this video, Brooke Hubbs (@miss_bilingual_bee) describes the centrality of social-emotional learning in her work with SIFE (Students with Interrupted Formal Schooling) students. She further elaborates on the BEST piece of advice she’s given to her mainstream colleagues since the shut-down.

With distance learning here to stay, the sooner we integrate best practices on content-language teaching, the better.

If language matters (as my brand assumes) then what does language have to do with anti-racist education?

Nothing has been normal since the pandemic hit schools last spring. The current back-to-school climate has produced an unprecedented anxiety in all educational stakeholders, returning our gaze to how CoVID is further exacerbating the ‘achievement gap’ between well-resourced and the working class families.

Let’s put an end to linguistic discrimination in the classroom. My goal in writing these blog posts (see my previous post on the problem with ALM-ers) is to bring an applied linguistics lens to some of the cultural issues we face in modern American society, often with a focus on education.

In America, black lives do NOT matter as much as white lives do. Full stop. Black Lives Matter is a simple and eloquent sentence comprised of an adjective (black) that modifies a noun (lives) and concludes with a verb (matter). What’s implied (e.g. explicitly missing) from the sentence is the rest of the predicate:

The Planning of a Juicy Sentence // Before we get to the transcript, it’s helpful to know what Ms. Sosa’s lesson plan looks like. She had to analyze the juicy sentence on her own in order to prompt her students through the discussion…

Learn about how to center language in your teaching practice with this teacher practice brief about the juicy sentence protocol.